“They’re not, I’m sure,” Katy affirmed. “But the Commonwealth’s other option is Kesra. That means they’ll choose Narsai, because Kesra’s population is almost completely native sentient—and they can be damnably paranoid about even the small number of human residents that they already have. Believe me, I’ve lived there and I know.”
She paused. And because she was so busy focusing on what she needed to say next, when she had just thought about what it had been like to be the Narsatian wife of a human resident of Kesra, a memory of George Fralick that she hadn’t meant to revisit while Linc was attuned to her thoughts flashed into her consciousness and caught her unaware.
For thirteen years she had kept this one thing secret from her second husband. When she had come back to the Firestorm after her divorce and had fallen apart in his arms—while they had made love for the first time—and through every moment of mental and physical communion between them since then, she had kept it safely concealed. But now the forbidden memory intruded, and before she could banish it a single vivid image spilled over from her mind into his.
She felt his hand tighten until she wondered if he had crushed the bones of her fingers. He perceived her pain, and it made him relax that brutal grip almost immediately; but the real damage was already done.
She didn’t look at him, but she felt his eyes on her—and felt his mind probing hers, with an urgency to which she could not possibly respond in this very public setting. All she could do was tell him, in silence and with terrible firmness: “Later.”
Old habits asserted themselves then, and he obeyed her. Even without sound, that word had been uttered in the Matushka’s command voice.
CHAPTER 18
Katy had hoped no one else would notice the by-play between wife and husband, but of course the small silence drew puzzled looks in their direction. Nevertheless long practice had kept her face impassive, even when she had been hurt by that powerful squeezing of her hand.
She resumed speaking as if nothing had happened, because nothing had happened that she had any intention of explaining. She said, “So if war does come, I think that instead of welcoming Commonwealth forces onto its surface Kesra is quite likely to deport all its human residents—even those whose families have lived there for generations. Of the other two Outworlds, Sestus 4 would probably execute or simply starve their human population if they could no longer ship their ores to Commonwealth markets; they wouldn’t have a use for their miners any longer. And Sestus 3 would go on pretty much as it is now, because they still haven’t got much beyond being able to feed their own population agriculturally and their need for industrial goods is supplied by Sestus 4. Unless Linc wants to correct me on that, he grew up on Sestus 3.”
“No, you got it right.” Her husband gave her a look that probably puzzled everyone else, but that she understood perfectly. She had just made him speak to her normally, when that was the last thing he had wanted to do, and this was one of the rare times when he was really angry with her.
He was sick inside, he needed to be alone with her and talk to her. And right now that could not happen.
But they had lived this way for more of their life together than not; constrained by those around them, forced to wait for privacy to take care of their own and each other’s emotional needs. This time was worse than any other such occasion either of them could remember, but they would get through it.
He pressed her hand very gently, and she returned that clasp.
“So who in hell is it that wants this war? Who are the Rebs, anyway?” A young commissioner wanted to know that, but her question brought mutters of agreement from all around the circle.
“Outcasts.” To Katy’s amazement, her mother took over at that point. Cabanne Romanova had been the source of her daughter’s rather deep voice, a voice that was more powerful than it was melodious and that demanded to be heard. When everyone looked in her direction, the former Senior Chair Councilor continued.
“Katy just reminded us that Kesra, even more than Narsai, wants no part of immigrants,” she said. “Even if anyone would want to live on Sestus 3, it actually has very little space available for settlers—most of its usable areas already belong to large landowners; and Sestus 4 is a hellhole for humans, a refugee would go almost anyplace else before he or she would voluntarily go there to live. Yet Terra’s started supplying gens to take over job functions that up until now gave employment to the Inner Worlds’ lower classes, and as a result those people are being displaced by the thousands.”
“So? Isn’t that what the newer Outworlds are for? Planets like Farthinghome, like Claymore. And the one in the Mistworld system where the locals agreed humans could live on the surface, while they stayed in the clouds? There’s always been excess population flowing outward from Terra and the rest of the Inner Worlds, and that’s what’s always happened to it.” The young commissioner was frowning. “Kesra’s the only other world that I know of where population growth is prevented as successfully as we prevent it here on Narsai, and that hardly counts because Kesrans obviously don’t reproduce the way humans do.”
They certainly did not. The idea of routinely neutering all but two humans within each family group, in order to allow that pair to breed without the need to limit the number of their offspring, was appalling to everyone present—even though except for Lincoln Casey they were all Narsatians, who had accepted since childhood that one youngster was the best possible family size and that third babies simply should not be born on their world.
“So you’re saying that these outcasts as you call them, these people who are trying to settle in places like Farthinghome and Claymore and Tenzing, are where the Rebs get their ships and the people to operate them? And that the reason they want the Outworlds separated from the Commonwealth is so that the established planets will stop sending food and manufactured goods to the Inner Worlds, and make those things available to them instead?” The youngest of the councilors was speaking now. The older ones were looking troubled, but were saying nothing.
“Yes, and I believe she’s right.” Katy Romanova’s tone was one of finality. “They can’t look beyond Mistworld for trading partners, you see. The sector beyond Mistworld has no M-class worlds, not for so many light years that even our deepest probes haven’t yet reached a place where planets humans can use start occurring again.”
“Like coming to the end of a dock and falling in, and you can’t swim. So you either drown, or you take away someone else’s flotation device and let him drown instead.” That, of course, was the Harbormaster. The commissioner in charge of Narsatian aquaculture was called that, facetiously and affectionately; and while his analogy sounded ridiculous, he nevertheless had grasped the situation in which the settlers of the newest Outworlds now found themselves. “So can’t the diplomats get Terra to understand that, and let us sell those people the things they need?”
“The gens have to eat, too, Harbie. Terra can’t let us send ‘their’ supplies elsewhere, even if we could afford to practically give our produce away to people who can’t possibly pay us for them at full market prices.” Tart but truthful words, from a councilor who was not one of the youngsters.
Good, Katy Romanova thought with satisfaction. At last they were starting to grasp the situation, and were reluctantly grappling with it. It was late, so late, for them to be entering this game seriously—to stop trusting the Terran Ambassador and the Narsatian delegate to the Commonwealth Diet to take care of their world’s interests, when neither of those personages had a solid commitment to anything except the welfare of their own financial accounts—but Narsai’s leaders were trying now, and they were intelligent people.
Basically decent people, too, or their world would not be the peaceful and orderly place that it was. That it had been for centuries now, even its total population holding stable in a way that no other human-inhabited planet had ever managed to achieve.
“So what do you think, Katy? Should we join the Rebs, and kick the Terrans to hell o
ut of our sector?” That was Cabanne Barrett, representing the medical profession on Narsai. That she had treated the gen called Rachel Kane had not been mentioned, and wouldn’t be. A doctor’s movements through the community were a confidential matter, that was a basic principle of Narsatian privacy right along with the lack of pattern recorders in the public teleport system and the lack of tracer technology in the community-garaged aircars. Narsatians trusted one another, in a manner that was inconceivable to those reared elsewhere.
Learning to be suspicious had been Katy Romanova’s most difficult adaptation to life among non-Narsatians. She sometimes thought, now, that one reason George Fralick had attracted her so strongly in her youth was that he played the duplicitous games that were foreign to her so skillfully and with such outward charm.
She answered, “If you’re asking me what’s the morally correct side to be on, I’d have to say it’s the Rebs’ side. I hate what the Commonwealth’s becoming under Inner Worlds domination, Cab. I hate a system that can treat a human being’s body like a factory for reproductive cells, and that can deny a young woman like the one I’ve described to you her freedom and her right to bear her own children—just because she was made to order in a lab, instead of being conceived the usual way by a pair of lovers. The way Commonwealth worlds are using gens is slavery, no matter what name you use to dress it up, and it’s as hateful now as it was hundreds of years ago when wars were fought on Terra to get rid of it.”
She glanced around the circle, saw that every other person in it was still listening, and continued. “I hate throwing people out of their service careers because they didn’t graduate from the Academy, as if that were the only measure of loyalty that could possibly mean anything. And I hate it that after generations of encouraging Morthan men to leave their homes and devote their lives to taking care of us humans, now we’re going to force them all to go back where they came from because Terra is running scared of any and all nonhumans living among its own people.”
This last announcement was news here, she could tell. And while Narsai had never developed any real dependence on Morthan healers, as the strong guild headed by Cab Barrett attested, still that news caused heads to shake in puzzlement and voices to murmur in disbelief.
“Insane,” Cabanne Romanova said flatly. “They can get away with dismissing the healers from the Star Service, of course; that’s a discrete population, and it operates on strict top-down orders because of its nature as a military organization. But how do they propose to get rid of all the Morthans on staff at hospitals and clinics on all the Inner Worlds? If they could do that, who would replace those healers? And what would Mortha do with them, once they all arrived back there?”
“I’ve asked those questions, of someone who should have had the answers; and he didn’t have them.” Katy remembered Willard Tanaka’s impassive golden face, seen via holo-transmission not all that many hours ago, and she shook her head. “What I can tell you, though, is that it’s no new thing for a civilized society to decide that a sub-group is dangerous and to eject all that sub-group’s members even though the society actually needs them. Repeatedly in ancient Europe, nation states ejected their Jewish populations. One in the twentieth century actually attempted to murder every Jew they couldn’t manage to deport from their territories, and they came damnably close to succeeding.”
She glanced toward her father for confirmation, and Trabe Kourdakov nodded. “She’s right,” he said. “I can give you other examples. Ancient British landlords shipping the food grown by Irish peasants away from their country, and leaving their tenant farmers to starve literally to death. African tribal leaders cutting off food supplies to their enemies’ civilian populations, and then calling the result a ‘famine.’ It’s horrible to think that people today could do the same thing, but when you consider how most of even us here feel about Morthans….”
“I believe the term is ‘mindfucker.’” Lincoln Casey spoke up uninvited, and in spite of his wife’s warning thought just before he did so. His voice was soft, but it carried just as well as hers had; he, too, had given many orders on the bridge of an embattled starship.
“Not you,” Cabanne Romanova said gently. “You can’t probe our minds in this circle, Linc, and all of us know that. But if you could, we’d find you frightening—and we can’t help that.”
“I know. But I’m telling you why I don’t find it surprising at all that this is happening. I’m only surprised that it didn’t happen any sooner.” Casey’s thoughts touching his wife’s mind were bitter. That he could be accepted as nonthreatening by this group of full humans, because he was crippled by Morthan standards, was not the comforting thought that Katy’s mother seemed to believe it should be. Even she, kind soul, could not comprehend that instead it was the most galling of insults.
Katy comprehended it, though, and although she still wished her husband had stayed silent she pressed his hand with consoling tenderness. Then she said to the circle, “I’ve probably committed treason, espionage, illegal disclosure of confidential information—and who knows how many other different crimes, by talking with you the way I have today while I’m a flag-ranked officer on active duty in the Star Service. But I’m also a daughter of Narsai’s founders, I’m in the middle of everything that’s happening right now and that’s going to happen, and I honestly don’t know where my real duty lies. For a little while I thought I knew, when accepting recall meant I could take control of that ship up there in orbit; but that was before the damnable corporate marshal got his hands on Rachel Kane and Dan Archer, before I had to start thinking of myself as an accessory to their crime.”
“Rachel Kane?” A young commissioner tilted her dark, curly head thoughtfully.
“Yes, that’s her name. The gen I told you about, the woman who’s pregnant with Dan’s three babies.”
The gen had a name. Clearly that hadn’t entered the minds of most of these people, and it just as clearly made them uncomfortable because having a name made her seem real to them.
“We can’t solve the war question this morning, not when this is the first time we’ve even discussed it in session,” Trabe Kourdakov announced, and now his philosopher’s debating voice penetrated every one of his listener’s distracted minds and brought them back to the present. “But we have to deal with the matter of this corporate marshal, so-called, causing destruction of Romanov ancestral property. And we may wish to deal with his being able to come to our world and make off with four people to whom his employers mean to do harm. Lincoln Casey and Daniel Archer are citizens of Terra, and Rachel Kane is in legal terms a piece of property rather than a human being; but my daughter Katy is a Narsatian citizen, and I will be damned if I’ll let her status as an officer in the Star Service be the reason I give her up to that corporate jackal.”
“The purpose of our withholding legal protection from non-citizens wasn’t so they could abuse each other without penalty.” From across the room, a commissioner who had studied history before taking charge of Narsai’s transportation system spoke up thoughtfully. “It was simply to discourage them from settling here permanently. In the beginning we extended citizenship to the spouse of a Narsatian, if that spouse became resident here. We acknowledged the adoption by our citizens of children from off-world, and we didn’t treat opposite gender offspring differently than same gender offspring as long as there was one Narsatian parent.”
“What are you suggesting, Pal?” Cab Barrett asked that question, in a gently prompting tone.
“Only that the Council has the authority to restore the practice of older customs at any time. If a thing was done once, even very long ago, it can be done again. If the Council wishes.” Commissioner Pal inclined her head toward Senior Chair Councilor Trabe Kourdakov, in one of Narsai’s rare gestures of respect for an authority figure.
Kourdakov waited, mentally polling the room. While he did so the Harbormaster spoke up, in an almost plaintive tone. He said, “Last year I answered a distress call from a pleasu
re boat. One of its owners was the Terran-born husband of a Narsatian woman, and he’d drunk too much and had lost his temper and beaten his own child to death. The Terran embassy declared that the little boy was Narsatian, because he’d been born on this world and his father hadn’t registered his birth with them—but our custom said he was Terran, because that was his father’s world of origin. So except for the child’s mother all the people involved were outside our legal system’s control; and I couldn’t turn the bastard over to anyone to be punished, even though I can tell you that if I’d witnessed what he did I sure as hell would have stopped him. I don’t care whether our laws and customs covered the situation or not, I wouldn’t have let that happen.”
“It seems to me that we have the power to prevent something evil from happening now.” Cab Barrett spoke carefully, and did not look at Casey or Romanova because she did not want to remind the others in the circle of her close friendship with them. “Senior Councilor, I propose on behalf of the Commissioners that we return to our ancestral customs concerning the family members of our citizens. Let’s extend our legal system’s protection to the husband and the adopted son of Katy Romanova, and to her unborn grandchildren and those children’s mother.”
It was not unanimous, but it didn’t have to be. It was a clear majority, with the Councilors casting votes that were counted and recorded by Trabe Kourdakov and with the Commissioners expressing their guilds’ opinions.
The Harbormaster, who possessed law enforcement powers as had his long-ago predecessors back on Earth, and the often idle Chief Constable of Narsai, stayed behind with Katy Romanova and Lincoln Casey when everyone else left the meeting room.
Katy looked up into her husband’s face, and she finally felt free to give him a taut little smile. They both knew that this was only the first part of the battle won. They now had backing if they were able to get Rachel Kane and Daniel Archer away from the corporate marshal before that marshal’s shuttle headed out-system, but for all their titles the two officials who were going to offer assistance now knew almost nothing about how to accomplish that rescue. Such skills simply weren’t necessary in Narsatian society, not even for those whose jobs were supposed to include dealing with miscreants.
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